The question was linked from reddit and got some attention there, resulting in quite a few views and votes (16,032 referrals from reddit today).

Is it possible for us to see the referrers for our traffic? Yes. Is it cheap? No. There's a lot of HTTP log data (~50 GB/day storing just the top attributes we care about) and running queries on it isn't lightning fast...so I wouldn't imagine we'll expose this data in any kind of real-time way. Exposing something like a daily aggregate view would be possible, but not a quick development effort and way, way down the priority list (lots of big fish frying back in the kitchen at the moment).

I can't say for sure we'll ever expose this data in the UI, but as far as is it possible? yeah sure. Just remember most things are possible, but there are costs to every feature as well.

@Arjan - so it's not completely a declined, there is data that's cheap from when you link a question, e.g. /q/123/<userid>, that's stored in the site's database with referrer as well...we could potentially show that at some point with proper indexing. As for the general purpose logs? Yeah that's a no for several reasons, not the least of which being we punish that DB server severely when querying older than 7 days (PCIe SSD vs. massive spinny disk array switch over).
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Nick Craver♦Aug 12 '12 at 22:01